I was born in Israel and my parents were idealistic pioneers. They built Israel from nothing, with all the others there of course. They wanted social justice, a place to live and grow their food, a place where they could have a country and a piece of land and they wanted their children to be born in a country with a house and a field. I drank idealism with my mother’s milk. (This was long ago. Now it is a bit more complicated there.)

I was an artist from young age. I went to study graphic design. In Graphic Design you make art that is used immediately. Then I was an illustrator. As an illustrator you illustrate children’s books, for children to grow up with good stories, with knowledge and love of the world about them, with a good taste in art, as it makes for a better life. And you illustrate for adults so that they will think in a different way and they will laugh…

Then I got involved with Buddhist meditation, and the idea was to know what I am, so that I’ll live my true life.

And indeed, once you start to know something you start teaching. What can be more important than helping others know what they are, so that their lives will be good, and truthful? And that they will be good people, help each other and create a wonderful world for all of us, and our offspring…

Then I went to study art therapy, so I would be able to help people get rid of what held them back from being what they were. To show them how to become free of inhibiting ideas and thrive, so that they can live happily and lovingly etc.

And I did all these. I was idealistic and practical.

Then I started to know that every one of us has his own world, created by his own consciousness. We do not live in the same world. Our worlds meet with each other and it looks as if it is one world, but it is not so.

You can’t create a meaningful change in any part of the reality that is around you in your world. If you want this reality to change, you have to change yourself. The new thoughts and beliefs that you will have will bring to you everything that fits this new state of mind. So I cannot change or help change the people who come to do therapy with me. In one view, they are part of my outside world. I have to change myself, and as a result another version of that person will appear in my world, which will be a match to the way I have become. From another view, the patient is in another world, where he is the only one who can make changes in his world, by changing himself.

I always thought that we all lived in the same world. That there was one person in front of me, who suffered, and I helped him release the suffering and live a better life. But no.

And I thought that making art was a good thing for other people, to widen and deepen their experience, to give them the experience of beauty that will help them live a more beautiful life, with love, with collaboration, with understanding…

Now I felt there was no sense in doing anything. I always had a purpose for doing things and I missed it.

It felt like depression.

Then I decided to ask August Moon about it.

August Moon is my inner guide. I have been connected with him for a while. He always answers. He is always there.

I asked and made a drawing, as I like to get the answers through the art. Sometimes I know through words, but if it is a big thing, I make art and read the answer in it. I just like it this way.

And as soon as I started making the art, I knew the answer. The lines in the drawing spoke to me with the energy that is in them:

The reason to do anything, to do all that you want to do, is not that there is a need for it. You are not doing it for any idealistic purpose. You do it because it is your nature to be interested in doing things. It is your nature to love. It is your nature to be curious, playful, peaceful, capable and creative. This nature is what you are and it is expressed by what you do. So you do, just because you are a natural expresser of yourself.

So, you see? There is no outside reason for me to be happy. I am happiness.

All the colors stand around me, in bottles, tubes and pencils. They are looking quietly at what I do. What will I say? They are my audience now.

I love them. They can do infinite things. They do not really look. I know. It is the whole who looks. The infinite listening-with-the-heart. The heart-of-listening. His name is I.

When the light of seeing is bright and strong, everything that is non-transparent burns into non-existence. Its energy is left with no job. It gives itself back to be used for creation.

The name of the creator is I too.

It seems the light in the middle of the painting (the yellow and orange) is marred. It has been hit on the head.

Darkness (on the left) makes a threat. But the little child-who-flies is not afraid. He flies into the darkness to repair his past. He will find his love that he rejected in those old times. It is like the soul-retrieval that shamans do.

The goodness and the freedom-filled-joy, which is the lost part of him, will be found where it went to hide when it was not permitted to act in the world. It will be invited back and respected, loved, accepted, joined.

Again the lines tell the stories. The color shapes tell the emotions. The composition says that all is blessed, with all its tiniest details.

The white always looks with endless love and curiosity, with awe, with pride and marvel.

There is confusion there too, on the right, projecting a yes-no feeling.

Everything is okay.

The big yellow mother would like to say: Be careful!

But she knows that daring requires love and trust, and not carefulness. So she does not say a word. She admires her child.

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Yesterday in the morning I sat on the window seat and meditated. With all the lack of sleep that I collected, because of the pain, I fell asleep. I lost my balance and fell. I opened my eyes in the middle of the fall and saw the world turning around. But I was still asleep when my forehead hit the floor.

Then I woke up.

I felt fear and this conjured up memories from an event in my childhood, that now I saw more fully than before. Doors that were closed before, opened.

Fear cannot come if there is no story behind it. Falling cannot happen without a belief or a few beliefs that invite it. I know this is strange for some.

There are the lines and there are the color shapes. They seem to describe the same thing but they have very different perspectives.

Sometimes, in other paintings, the lines and the shapes do not necessarily describe the shame thing. If we compare this to music, then those paintings are like counterpoint. The lines have a tune and the color shapes have a different tune. But when they are placed on top of each other, the music makes sense. The music becomes richer by the working together of different tunes.

This painting is more like a tune with chords. The chords accompany the tune that the lines make.

If we look at the lines, trying to see the character of the tune, in my opinion, it is hesitant, even afraid somewhat. It tries to describe something but we cannot identify what it is. In a way it is like what toddlers do sometimes, when they pretend to be writing words and sentences but they don’t yet know how to write. So the lines only looks as if they are describing shapes. There is humor in that.

Now if we look at the color shapes, they don’t seem to be worried at all. They seem to be happy. They come together to share an activity and while playing together they keep their independence and individual identities. They seem to be playful and enjoying the game that they play.

If we describe the music here, it may be something like this: on the background of freely moving pleasant chords, the tune is hesitant. Its parts hold on to each other as if they are afraid to fall apart. There is no sense of freedom in the tune. It seems to be working hard, trying to fulfill some duty or necessity. It is a bit ridiculous in its efforts to describe everything in detail while it is impossible to decipher what it describes.

The chords in this piece of music are strange. They are a mixture of pleasant and unpleasant feelings.

I actually like that kind of music.

But if this were the description of a person, what would you want to tell him?

Maybe it will be, to let go of some of the seriousness with which it takes the story line, and give some attention to the deeper layer of himself, where the playfulness, freedom and maybe even the beauty of life’s experiences can be felt. This layer is so close…

But the story won’t stop. And we are here for the story, aren’t we?

So maybe it is possible to take some of the character of the inner layers of who we are and bring it with us outside, when we create the lines of our stories. Maybe we will then make lines that are a bit freer and happier than before?

Being tired and in pain I became sad. Pain is a simple thing but living with it creates additional problems. Now all of them weighed on me. I thought: I can’t go on like this any more. I did not even paint yesterday and today.

My friend from Germany called. We started to talk and the phone line went dead.

I pulled a new piece of paper onto the table, dipped the brush into the water and into the first paint that my eyes saw in the watercolor box. It was olive green. This is how I choose the first color.

And then there was the drawing. No time. No pain. Brush, water, paint and the composition, the story with no words. The energy of the truth. Everything is good.

The olive green lines and the white of the paper are the best of friends. It is a holy connection. The lines, strikingly, appearing out of the white. The white does not have inside and outside. It is everywhere. It is all-there-is-everywhere. Even the word everywhere does not fit here. Is the green line real? And my eyes that see it: are they real? And my heart that has just become so full and so delighted, what about it?

(The other colors came later.)

Now in a different way:

Pain is part of the illusion of life, together with the body, with time, with good and bad.

The true self cannot have pain. Its essence is joy. Its essence is love and playing and being curious. The true self cannot be affected by the illusion.

For the “I” in the illusion pain is real and hard.

The good thing is that everything is connected. All I need to do is to change the way I focus and switch my identity to the true I.

Instead of focusing on the pain and automatically trying to escape it, to fight it, to prevent it, to change it, Instead of these, I find my curiosity and make the olive green lines. I find my playfulness and play with everything that shows itself. I look for the beauty in everything and find it easily. I look for my joy and it is right there. I am joyful. I look for my love and indeed what else do I have? This is how I start to identify with the true self.

And as I do this, I find that I have forgotten the pain. I don’t even feel it. Or if I do, it is not significant. I am in peace. The vibrations of the pain, the waves that streamed through the legs calm down. My hands that clutched one foot fall down, relaxed. The body rests. The energy of creation flows flawlessly everywhere it has to go. The body heals. The specific thinking processes that hold on to the body and its suffering become weaker. I am not so dependent on the body and the world around it. I witness them and I am free. In my mind I am already walking down to town, where the galleries are. I am going to see an exhibition. Right foot, left foot and I dance.

I prepared many colors that were to go into many shapes. But when the painting got to this point, I knew it was finished.

There is an area where most of the colors are concentrated. From there, spreading to all directions, this pattern of things-added-to-things, where there are no filled-in colors, goes on beyond the area that we see.

It passed through my mind, before I started writing, that the most important thing for me in making the art is to look very precisely at the experience of the moment. This is what intuition does automatically but it does it in different degrees of precision, based on preparedness, openness, concentration and other conditions. This idea came to me some time before, when I saw, in other cases, that when the art was true to what was experienced in the moment to a greater degree, the art looked very beautiful to me. This makes “beautiful” equal to “what is true now.” I have found this to be true not only in regard to my own art but in regard to the art of clients too. When their art looks very beautiful to me, I know that it is a very good description of what is happening with them now. Interesting, isn’t it? But this time I am thinking about other characteristics of this state.

When the description is precise, the looking itself releases the perceived state completely. The state leaves and a new state rises in the field of experience. The new state that will arise is a response to my vibratory state. If I am confused, a confusing state will arise. If I am happier than before, the new state that will appear for me, will be happier.

If you look at the artwork again, and consider the empty shapes as a structure, ready to be filled out, but not yet filled, then it is like looking at the blueprint of my subconscious. Every empty cell is a belief that can be activated. For the time being, I have focused only on those cells in the middle and they have gotten activated.

Now two things can happen.

If I am not aware, then the entity that sees and experiences the thing that appeared in my experience is my blueprint. My blueprint can also be called my autopilot (or the subconscious). It has habitual responses. Most of the autopilot’s responses have to do with a not-so-good feeling. It is not an empowered state. The responses are not inspired or passionate. They are just automatic. Then another response will arise to the new state and it will go on like this automatically, one response after another, strengthening existing tendencies and leaving me a bit more entrenched in my beliefs, or less flexible.

If I am aware, everything becomes different. First, the awareness makes the experience beautiful. Then, if the state that is experienced is less good feeling than the state of awareness with the beauty that it perceives, the not so good state will dissolve into the better feeling state. This new state will be the state that invites the next experience, so the next experience will be better than the one before. It is a big difference, isn’t it?

So we see that being aware changes the course of events toward better feeling states.

Now imagine that the area in the middle of the artwork that has colors in it is experienced by awareness, as it does in this case, through the artwork. In my mind now, the state that awareness looks at is changing into a better feeling state. And now, everything in its environment has to change too, to match the better state in its midst. This area around the middle is the whole blueprint of expectations, all the potential “work orders” for the autopilot to operate from. So, based on the small change in part of it, the whole blueprint becomes different and we have a different person. I am becoming a different being. Only my habitual thoughts believe that I am still the same.

This entry is long. It described one more of those processes in which I discover an issue that is central and comes up again and again. I release the issue or dissolve it thoroughly by doing a process that you have seen before and today I call it a visual meditation.

Imagine yourself meditating. In a few minutes you calm down a little. And then a feeling comes up and you are uncomfortable with it. What happens now?

First let’s consider the feeling. It came up for a reason. You were trying to meditate and it came to stop you from doing it. Why? Because meditation connects you to who you really are, a being who does not have the limitations of the ego. The ego will have to give up its existence, if you go there, and it does not want to do it. You have trained it to protect itself in every way it can.

So it is the ego’s fear of being eliminated that appears in the different ways that it does. This disturbing feeling, arising in the meditation, is one of them. It is connected to a certain issue that is important for the ego. The ego has many issues. I don’t want you to feel negatively about the ego so I’ll say what the ego is, as I see it. It is the belief that you are a separate being who has to protect himself in order to be safe. This belief collects about itself numerous thought patterns of self-protection and preservation. That’s all it is.

So here a choice comes our way, as this issue comes up in the meditation and makes us feel uncomfortable. What do we choose to do: One possibility is to leave the ego intact, maybe change something unimportant in it, or not even this. The other possibility is to start eliminating the ego.

I have to disclose a secret. There is no escape from eventually eradicating the ego altogether. But we can postpone it. If we postpone, the same issue will come up for us again and again. The more we fight with it, the stronger it becomes. Then comes a time when it is so painful to have it that we must do something to ease the pain. It may even turn into an illness of the body. Many times it does just this.

Most people don’t know this, and therefore try their best to push the unpleasant experiences away.

There is something else that encourages us to dissolve the ego. It is a deep sense of satisfaction and happiness, when we do it. If we start working on dissolving the ego, we start feeling these two and more. We feel joy arising and we feel that we live purposefully. And when we push the unpleasant feeling away, in spite of the momentary relief, if we listen to how we feel when we do it, we find that we feel fear, tension, discomfort and other feelings like these.

So if we listen to ourselves and become more aware of what we feel, we take hold of a navigation mechanism that if we utilize, will take us all the way to freedom from our ego. The same issues that are afraid to be dissolved, are also those issues that cause us psychological suffering. For these issues we go to therapy. So therapy, when it helps us get rid of such issues, is also a spiritual practice.

In meditation there are two ways to release issues. The first is to frustrate them. The issues get their energy from the attention that we give them. We give them attention because we feel fear and think that they are important and indicate dangerous conditions. So if we just choose every time when we feel an issue arising to give our full attention not to the issues, but to the meditation, the issues don’t get our attention. They try harder and harder, but then they die from lack of energy, because we do not give them the energy of fear that sustains them. Do they die completely? Most probably not. They will come up again and again. But in this method we are focused on going straight to experience what we truly are, so we do not care about the issues. Once you experience who you are, it will become much easier for you to let go of all of these issues. If you choose this way you need to meditate continuously. If you take a break for a few days, the issues that were neglected but still have some presence, will get stronger again. If you loose your focus, the ego takes control again.

The second way is to give attention to the issues that arise, but not in the usual way of giving attention. Usually, as we said before, that attention that we give is fear. We feel afraid that the issue will be dangerous to us, so we try to stop it or run away from it into another thought or activity. The attention that is beneficial is acceptance. We look at the emotional phenomena without getting involved. We allow the feeling to arise and flourish fully in our attention and we pay close attention without thoughts. It is like the wonder that a child can feel when seeing something he has never seen before, and he does not have words for it yet. If we do that, the feeling will grow, show itself and dissolve into nothing, without any effort extended by us. This kind of watching without being involved in the usual way cannot be done when we are in the thinking mode. We have to switch to a deeper state, which we call meditation.

The visual meditation that follows is of the second kind. We enter a meditative state by becoming intuitive.And we become intuitive by following the personal sense of beauty as the only guide in the art making. The following seven drawings were done in this way. After they were made, I read them in ways that have been described before in this blog. In my case the reading becomes poems, just because I like poems but they could end up being short stories too. The main thing is that the reading is intuitive too. It is just a way to bring the awareness from a non-verbal state to a verbal state, so that we can see what is there and choose what we want to do.

After each drawing was done and read, I asked: And how is the feeling now? And made the next drawing.

I am going through changes and for some time I felt as if I was floating in space in some way, not feeling like doing anything, because it was not clear to me why to act at all. A whole old paradigm, so to speak, became obsolete and the new paradigm is unfolding still.

I did a lot of drawings during this process and won’t be able to show them all to you. I never was able to sow all that I was doing. I try to show the important ones. Some of the work included pretty intense release of old programs from the subconscious. Thinking about what I intended to do, I found myself afraid one day and started to draw, which lead me to feel wanting to grow but escaping, then there was a big self cancellation, then an experience of shock, then anger and more anger, and eventually good feeling. This was done in twelve drawings and quick writing, in one evening and the morning that came after it.

Then there was a shorter, four pictures version of the same thing, as it repeated itself like an echo.

Then these two:

For the first, five short poems came, instead of a single long one.

Curious

As they are looking for something they forgot

They are making a tapestry

Of happy swimming.

Tickling each other pleasantly

Telling each other they cannot find their goal

They are full of curious life force.

Laughing

Sliding bodies

With open eyes.

Filling up the space

Many fish are

Swimming nowhere

To the sun they come

From the depths

Of darkness.

Looking at the drawing now I feel I did not express something about the quality of the lines in the lower part. They seem to be rotting. There is a Zen book called Swampland Flowers, which is a collection of letters written by master Ta Hui to a student, about how to practice in everyday life. The name means to hint at the idea that the lotus flower, which represents enlightenment, cannot grow in the clean fresh air of the mountains. It has to grow in the swamps of the valleys, where it is hot, humid and dirty.

I see in it all the joy that arises from all of my self-work and the peace I feel about pleasant, light hearted touching.

The next drawing is from two days later.

Touching lightly

Standing one behind the other

Curious and interested in experiencing

The parts that were banned

And what a blessing it is

There are many ways of saying no

But the yes is one

And always there, inside of all of them

As it is

Forever true.

Looking at the two drawings and words you can see how things work themselves quietly in the subconscious. The constant exposure to the flow of intuition, or maybe I can call it the flow of truth, gradually dissolves everything that is not true and leaves what is true untouched, as it can never be taken away. It was a surprise for me when this happened, because I did not work on it knowingly. This too shows something about the method of intuitive flow. You just do the work, following what comes up and there is a wise order of what is being tackled, happening on its own, guided by deeper knowledge. We could not arrive at this wise order through thinking and analyzing. Life, as it turns out, is much easier than your think.

I remember working with a person who came to me to get rid of his depression. We worked on whatever showed up. Sometimes it was possible to see that it was related to the depression, and sometimes it was other things. Dealing with all that just floated up to our knowledge, one thing after another, one day there was no depression there any more. And this is for life, as all the mental software that created the depression, all that tapestry of many small issues, dissolved and was not there any more.